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Diversity-Aware Recommendation for Human Collectives

Abstract: Sharing economy applications need to coordinate humans, each of whom may have different preferences over the provided service. Traditional approaches model this as a resource allocation problem and solve it by identifying matches between users and resources. These require knowledge of user preferences and, crucially, assume that they act deterministically or, equivalently, that each of them is expected to accept the proposed match. This assumption is unrealistic for applications like ridesharing and house sharing (like airbnb), where user coordination requires handling of the diversity and uncertainty in human behaviour.
We address this shortcoming by proposing a diversity-aware recommender system that leaves the decision-power to users but still assists them in coordinating their activities. We achieve this through taxation, which indirectly modifies users’ preferences over options by imposing a penalty on them. This is applied on options that, if selected, are expected to lead to less favourable outcomes, from the perspective of the collective. The framework we used to identify the options to recommend is composed by three optimisation steps, each of which has a mixed integer linear program at its core. Using a combination of these three programs, we are also able to compute solutions that permit a good trade-off between satisfying the global goals of the collective and the individual users’ interests. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with two experiments in a simulated ridesharing scenario, showing: (a) significantly better coordination results with the approach we propose, than with a set of recommendations in which taxation is not applied and each solution maximises the goal of the collective, (b) that we can propose a recommendation set to users instead of imposing them a single allocation at no loss to the collective, and (c) that our system allows for an adaptive trade-off between conflicting criteria.

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The SmartSociety project is supported by the European Comission, in the area "FET Proactive: Fundamentals of Collective Adaptive Systems" (FOCAS) (ICT-2011.9.10), as a Collaborative Project (generic), under the 7th Framework programme, Grant agreement n. 600854.